Beholden to the cargo cult: Australia's political class is letting us down

One remark, in particular, caught Bob Zoellick's attention. America's former trade minister and previous president of the World Bank had been listening to an hour-long discussion about Australia at a conference on the Gold Coast earlier this year. He wanted to make sure he'd heard correctly.

It's a timely reminder. The rest of the world would love to have our problems. Most other nations suffer the consequences of acute crises like recessions, violence, poverty or government repression, Australia's biggest problems are the result of complacency.

They're First World problems. Indeed, Australia is the very definition of the first world. Of all the countries on the planet, Australia is consistently ranked No. 2 or No. 3 for its overall living standards.

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Illustration: Jim Pavlidis

Taking account of everything from water quality to work-life balance, the OECD's Better Life index ranks Norway, Denmark and Australia as the countries with the very best living conditions. The UN's Human Development Index considers income and life expectancy and years of education and ranks Norway and Australia as the topmost nations on earth. Out of 188.

Australia has an abundance of every resource imaginable. Physical and intellectual. And even social. The Hansonite right of politics and the "identity politics" left constantly egg Australians on to hate each other. Both sides promote division over cohesion.

Yet they have largely failed. Australia remains an open and harmonious society with a strong sense of shared national identity together with the second-biggest intake of immigrants per capita of any country.

When Malcolm Turnbull says that "Australia is the most successful multicultural nation" on earth, he's not making it up. Australia has gone through the traumas of Lambing Flats and Cronulla, with the White Australia policy in between, yet has managed to learn, develop and adjust. The secretary-general of the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic States, Iyad Ameen Madani, former culture minister of Saudi Arabia, told me last year: "You in Australia have managed what every country wants." And what's that? "Social harmony."

Running the gauntlet: John Alexander and Kristina Keneally hand out how-to-vote cards at Epping station on Friday.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Australia has developed in a free society a cohesion that Saudi Arabia and other countries try to achieve through repression. And, overall, we've put it all together pretty well for a former convict colony. Yet again and again we surrender to a complacency that delivers mediocrity. Or worse.

How otherwise to explain a global energy superpower with the most expensive electricity in the world? A vast "land of sweeping plains" with a sparser population than Iceland yet with real estate so expensive that the younger generation has been priced out of the housing market?

Australia is one of the world's top three exporters of high-quality education. So how can it allow its own children's reading and writing abilities to remain in a relentless slide towards illiteracy, a dismal annual ratings ritual the country bemoans yet cannot escape?

And how to explain perhaps the ultimate paradox - one of the freest peoples that has ever existed, ranked by American institutions to be freer than Americans themselves, has a growing portion of the population saying they'd prefer to live under a dictator?

A Japanese diplomat stationed in Australia in recent years told me that he perceived Australia as "a man lying on a bed of treasure". A country that can't be troubled to develop its full potential, in other words. Why is this so?

Partly it's the treasure itself. Rich resource endowments are usually a blight on a society, not a blessing. In most countries founded on underground wealth, the society tears itself apart in a competition for the spoils. Civil war and corruption keep Africa's resource-rich nations in perpetual poverty, for instance.

The only societies that have discovered mineral wealth and been able to turn it into national wealth are Britain's offspring societies - Australia, Canada, the US, for instance - where strong independent institutions have prevailed over the temptation to warlordism. Other countries that have tapped resource riches successfully, like Norway, discovered them when they had already achieved the status of a developed democracy.

Yet the resources curse has visited Australia in a different form, in the guise of national complacency. The most recent mining boom was the last lament of Donald Horne, author of the 1964 national psychological diagnosis titled The Lucky Country.

"It's quite appalling to discover people saying today that Australia is still the lucky country because of all these minerals," he told me in 2005 in his final interview. "There's still a bloody lucky-country mentality!"

It's an extension of the cargo cult, the World War II phenomenon among some Pacific islanders who'd seen American or Japanese military supplies arrive out of the blue on their islands. Lacking any better explanation, they imagined that it was divine largesse. If only they kept on praying and looking skyward, another delivery of riches would parachute upon them.

This idea, that the answer lay outside our own society, was central to Horne's entire thesis of Australian neuralgia. At core, it was, as he put it, a "derivatve-society thesis - the essential thing in the writing of The Lucky Country was derivativeness". It was a country that was suspicious of original talent, lived on "other people's ideas", and was in perpetual hope of salvation from abroad.

This syndrome remains central to Australian attitudes, despite all of the country's many successes. On a minor scale as well as a major one.

Why did Australians remain slavishly devoted to European food fashions for centuries, scorning unique native ingredients and flavours, until a foreigner arrived and told us they were, actually, pretty marvellous? It was a Dane, Rene Redzipi of Noma, who arrived in Sydney and started selling us our own native foods at tremendously inflated prices.

Why did Australians bin or burn Aboriginal art until American and European collectors told us that it was actually quite fascinating? The indigenous art wing was the very last part of the National Gallery of Australia to be built, a 2010 afterthought.

And on the bigger scale, Australians have been stubbornly resistant to the idea of homegrown economic success. The national sense of inadequacy has led Australians to consider that if there is any economic salvation, it must be delivered from abroad.

Australia's economic rejuvenation under the Hawke and Keating governments, with some finishing touches from Howard and Costello, gave it an exceptionally flexible new structure. In the last quarter-century, Australia has grown undisturbed by the great traumas of our age - the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the 2001 US recession, the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

And, of course, most Australians will tell you that our contemporary prosperity is the result of the mining boom. A boom that arrived from abroad.

A boom that came along after Australia had already enjoyed its longest economic expansion, a dozen years of booming conditions and counting. In fact, while the mining boom was important to help Australian economic resilience during the global crisis, good bank regulation and well-timed fiscal policy were equally important, perhaps more so.

And the mining boom carried its inevitable cost - the revival of complacency, as Horne lamented. Australia entered the mining boom with no national debt. It ended the mining boom with chronic debt and deficit. And a panic gripped the country - what will we do when the boom ends?

Well the boom has ended. In Australian history, the end of a mining boom inevitably brought bust. This time, for the first time, the economy adjusted pretty readily. Courtesy of the same flexibility that allowed Australia to ride out the Asian and American and global crises.

The Reserve Bank tells us that the end of the boom imposed a cost of about 1 per cent of economic contraction per year over the past few years, but that that effect has now worked its way through the system.

And now the new panic. And, once again, it's a panic that assumes Australia's success is entirely a gift from abroad. Be nice to the Chinese Communist Party or they will cancel our economic growth! "By far the biggest single factor that has driven Australian prosperity over the last two decades has been the rise of China and we ignore that at our peril," intones the former Victorian premier and chairman of the Australia China Business Council, John Brumby. "We are concerned about anything which may harm our bilateral relationship."

He's flat wrong. The biggest factor driving Australia's prosperity has been no single country or industry. It's been Australia's economic structure and good policy. Yet the cargo cult lives on. "The Chinese government can quite easily turn off the Australia tap," panics the former Hawke government minister Graham Richardson. "The US won't rescue us in that event and neither will Britain or America." Richardson was very close to the rejuvenation project yet has failed to comprehend it.

Centuries after European settlement, Australians are yet to appreciate their own surroundings, their own gifts, and, as Bob Zoellick discovered, their own successes.

While all of this was going on, Australia's voters decided that economic prosperity had nothing to do with the federal government. When Australia casually dismissed the Howard government, it was the first time postwar that a government had been voted out at a time of unambiguous economic growth.

The voters had stopped giving the politicians credit for economic performance. The political class found this liberating. Both sides of politics then plunged into a frenzy of self-indulgence. Personal ambition broke all restraints as Labor descended into the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd fratricide, to be followed by the Turnbull-Abbott mayhem.

Australia burned through prime ministers faster than Italy. To the dismay of the voters, Canberra became the coup capital of the Western world. In the latest Fairfax-Ipsos poll, an overwhelming 71 per cent of voters said that they wanted a serving prime minister to be allowed to serve his full term, even when the prime minister himself was unpopular.

So Australia's frustrating inability to realise its potential is partly to do with the bed of treasure, but it's also to do with the man lying on it. The complacent man is not a metaphor for the Australian workforce, which is among the hardest working and most creative on earth.

It's the political class and the political parties. Australia's vast resources - physical, intellectual and social - can only be fully mobilised by good policy. And that means that the policy-making mechanism has to work properly. The policy-making mechanism is also the problem-solving mechanism. It's called national politics.

But with the political parties lost in a parallel universe of petty partisan parlour games, the system is not working well. The campaigning in the Bennelong byelection is a microcosm of the problem. The fact that parents called the police to complain that political campaigners were interfering with their ability to get their children to school is a neat encapsulation.

Normal people - citizens - don't want the political class to impose their partisan squabbles onto their lives. On the contrary, the people want the political class to solve problems to improve their daily lives. Yet the main political parties haven't even managed to solve the self-made problem of their dual citizenship disqualifications.

It's evidently beyond them to deal with some of the larger problems. True, most of Australia's problems are the problems of success, a consequence of complacency. But the political class seems incapable of understanding that their mighty Manichean struggles and great vanity projects are merely maddening to the people. I hope that helps, Bob. That's what everyone is complaining about.